Television viewing and recording technology has been continually advancing, with hundreds of channels, digital video recorders (DVRs), and video-on-demand programs finding their way into many homes. Despite such advances, problems still remain. One such problem is that although some systems may allow different users to begin watching the same program at different times, this can result in situations where many dedicated sessions are established between a program server and each of multiple individual users' systems for the same program. This can thus result in increased resource requirements and costs for servers and other components, and thus the overall cost of the television viewing system.